The evidence was overwhelming, in the end, because the truth usually is, once someone insists on assembling it.

There was the forensic examination.

There was the parking-lot security footage, which established the timeline no waiver could erase — how long the child had been left, and by whom, and that no lock had malfunctioned at all.

And there were the text logs between Luke and his mother, Celina, which laid out the shape of the cover-up in their own words: the plan to substitute one child for another, to check Bruno in under our family’s name, to bring me a settlement before I had time to think, to make the whole thing disappear under money and a signature.

It was all there, in writing, because arrogant people so often cannot help writing things down, certain as they are that no one will ever be permitted to read them.

Faced with all of it, both Luke and Camellia pleaded guilty.